When the fight between Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather was initially announced, many scoffed at the idea that it would be competitive. McGregor proved his doubters wrong.

LAS VEGAS -- When it was all said and done, the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor spectacle delivered an actual fight after all.
That was really the question all along, right? Would all of this hype and social media theater produce anything that resembled a real fight? Or were we just buying into some well-lit exhibition match, whose only purpose was to make all of its beneficiaries rich?
Even the stingiest of haters out there would have a hard time complaining about Saturday's junior middleweight fight at T-Mobile Arena.
Mayweather, who reached his perfect 50-0 mark, expertly weathered McGregor's early storm before opening up offensively in a way fans hadn't seen in years.
It was an amazing performance by Mayweather, at age 40, coming off two years of inactivity.
But even though Mayweather took the opportunity afterward to say he'd made good on his promise to pay back disgruntled fans from his flat fight against Manny Pacquiao two years ago, it was McGregor who made this fight.
It was McGregor, 29, who went from a welfare-check-collecting no-name in Dublin to the biggest star in mixed martial arts in four years. It was McGregor's stardom that brought Mayweather back, and it was competitive refusal to go down (even in a hard-to-watch ninth round) that brought out the long lost killer in Mayweather.
Immediately after the fight, McGregor sipped whiskey from clear plastic cups and watched highlights of the fight, while celebrities waited outside to pay their respects. McGregor met with each and every one eventually, and looked happy to receive them, but what he really wanted to discuss was the fight.
How could referee Robert Byrd stop the bout in the 10th? Why does McGregor have a tendency to slip into sloppiness during the middle rounds of a fight? (He recognizes he did so in both of his Nate Diaz bouts as well.) During interviews, he moved and shadowboxed and replayed certain moments of the fight.
His coach, John Kavanagh, penned a book titled, "Win or Learn," and McGregor was already focused on the latter. He'd just collected the biggest paycheck of his life and fought the best boxer of his generation. Thirty million dollars was the purse, and his final haul will be more. But the only thing on his mind was the fight.
Look, no one really knew what to expect going into this one. UFC president Dana White told ESPN early Saturday he felt sick to his stomach with nerves. His exact words were, "I've never felt like this before."
By the end of the night, those nerves were gone. Defeat was probably inevitable, but it was the best of defeats. In his locker room afterward, McGregor hinted he could probably beat Mayweather if given another shot, armed with this experience.
Plenty would probably still disagree, although they wouldn't be as confident about it a second time around.
If you bought in for the spectacle, you got more than you bargained for. And if this was your first McGregor experience, you're probably thinking about coming back.
Mixed martial arts is not the small niche sport, fighting for legitimacy, it once was -- but it's still one that gets a little defensive when it's on the biggest stage. MMA knows it has something special in McGregor -- but it hoped the world got to see that, under the hostile circumstances of a boxing match against Mayweather.
It did.

Professional boxing, a "sport" that should no longer exist in the first place, has been mobbed up for many decades and is responsible for the most serious injuries to the unfortunates who have been taken advantage of, starting but not stopping with Mohammed Ali. I do not understand why a responsible member of this board takes it seriously, even on the dubious terms of competitive strong-contact sports.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Growing up I followed sports much more closely than now-boxing was included. Later on I remember watching films of the Louis/Marciano fight when Louis was making a comeback-for many rounds he definitely outboxed Marciano but Marciano just kept coming at him and finally wore him out--this current attraction reminded of all the hype for that one-- for me it was sad to see Louis finally dropped to the canvas. Regards, Len

Growing up I followed sports much more closely than now-boxing was included. Later on I remember watching films of the Louis/Marciano fight when Louis was making a comeback-for many rounds he definitely outboxed Marciano but Marciano just kept coming at him and finally wore him out--this current attraction reminded of all the hype for that one-- for me it was sad to see Louis finally dropped to the canvas. Regards, Len

Growing up in the same TV market (which in those days involved only broadcasting), I remember an ABC series called Wide World of Sports. I enjoyed some of those programs, but when the marketers discovered that things like log-rolling weren't making money, they decided without changing the name to make it the wide world of boxing, at which point I lost interest.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Professional boxing, a "sport" that should no longer exist in the first place, has been mobbed up for many decades and is responsible for the most serious injuries to the unfortunates who have been taken advantage of, starting but not stopping with Mohammed Ali. I do not understand why a responsible member of this board takes it seriously, even on the dubious terms of competitive strong-contact sports.

Norman Mailer made some decent literature out of boxing. Including the infamous Benny Paret vs. Emile Griffith III match.

If the College Board, Advanced Placement folks take it seriously, who am I to argue?

The Death of Benny Paret — Norman Mailer
Passage taken from an AP English Literature & Composition Exam
Essay asked students to analyze the tone, rhetorical strategies and other literary techniques found in this passage.

Paret was a Cuban, a proud club fighter who had become welterweight champion because of his unusual ability to take a punch. His style of fighting was to take three punches to the head in order to give back two. At the end of ten rounds, he would still be bouncing, his opponent would have a headache. But in the last two years, over the fifteen-round fights, he had started to take some bad maulings.

This fight had its turns. Griffith won most of the early rounds, but Paret knocked Griffith down in the sixth. Griffith had trouble getting up, but made it, came alive and was dominating Paret again before the round was over. Then Paret began to wilt. In the middle of the eighth round, after a clubbing punch had turned his back to Griffith, Paret walked three disgusted steps away, showing his hindquarters. For a champion, he took much too long to turn back around. It was the first hint of weakness Paret had ever shown, and it must have inspired a particular shame, because he fought the rest of the fight as if he were seeking to demonstrate that he could take more punishment than any man alive. In the twelfth, Griffith caught him. Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin. I was sitting in the second row of that corner—they were not ten feet away from me, and like everybody else, I was hypnotized. I had never seen one man hit another so hard and so many times. Over the referee’s face came a look of woe as if some spasm had passed its way through him, and then he leaped on Griffith to pull him away. It was the act of a brave man. Griffith was uncontrollable. His trainer leaped into the ring, his manager, his cut man, there were four people holding Griffith, but he was off on an orgy, he had left the Garden, he was back on a hoodlum’s street. If he had been able to break loose from his handlers and the referee, he would have jumped Paret to the floor and whaled on him there.

And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, “I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,” and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him. He began to pass away. As he passed, so his limbs descended beneath him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.

Last edited by jserraglio on Mon Aug 28, 2017 4:15 pm, edited 11 times in total.